Is there a music AI yet?
Are full musical scores available in digital format? Mozart, Beethoven etc? Led Zep?
Does that music AI grasp different sorts of ensembles? Brass band, big band, jazz trio, Mozart size orchestra, Bruckner size?
So, feed the digital scores into the different ensemble models, create the Pastoral by jazz trio (more likely, brass band, but why not kazoo orchestra?) and, maybe – different because still copyright – run Led Zep on different sizes of orchestra.
Flood Spotify and live off the proceeds.
So, what’s wrong with this idea? If the creation is cheap enough – as in, a few keystrokes for each piece per style – then the pitiful streaming payments still add up.
Anyone?
Suno.
Plus all the others. Subscription charges may apply, or other restrictions for the “free” stuff.
Digital scores? You mean MIDI files? Probably knocking around somewhere, almost certainly for classical music. Not sure about more modern stuff tho’.
>What’s wrong with this idea?
AI models are not magical copyright deauthoring machines, they’re just a gigantic matrix of coefficients derived from
the stuff you feed in. If you feed in a bunch of unlicensed data to train on, then what you get out is now a derived work of stuff you had no right to in the first place.
“What colour are your bits” [ https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 ] pre-dates AI by around fifteen years, but it’s still correct about the IP law, and a generative AI model is no different legally from the example of “Monolith” XORing Office and Photoshop in any way other than scale and complete.
People like to anthropomorphise things, and they like to anthropomorphise AI, and say that it’s “inspired” by the training data and it comes up with “original” content using its “imagination”, but it doesn’t do any of this it’s all just Math.
It would be possible to do this in a way that doesn’t get you sued and doesn’t let your customers just distribute everything, but you’d need a large corpus of music you do have the rights to to train a model on*, and you’d need to stick to stuff that’s in the public domain for prompts.
>Is there AI music yet
Yes, absolutely. Youtube is flooded with AI music channels in basically any genre you like, because although training a model on other people’s music without their permission and then distributing the output is just piracy with more steps, people still pirate music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zTei5RMhQ8
Give it a year or so, and you’ll see 24/7 AI radio that never plays the same music twice: https://musically.com/2024/08/15/melodio-is-the-worlds-first-ai-powered-music-streaming-platform/
>What’s wrong with this idea?
If it’s easy enough for you to do it, i.e. you’re not adding anything you alone can do, it’s easy for someone else to sell or give away the cow. One download, once, and you can have all the AI music you can ever listen to.
* ChatGPT sounds so smug because it was trained off of posts on Reddit and Stackoverflow, and they got the rights to do that by owning the sites and putting it in the ToS.
What is the difference between AI in this scenario and someone who . . . listens to a lot of music and incorporates 10,000 years of musical tradition into their work?
“someone who . . . listens to a lot of music and incorporates 10,000 years of musical tradition into their work?” is not a completely deterministic mathematical function.
People like to anthropomorphise AI as people like to anthropomorphise everything and in a lot of cases it’s a useful abstraction that helps them to understand and reason about it. But when it comes to copyright law, anthropomorphising the AI gets in the way because you start thinking of the AI as “creative”, and “using its imagination” and “producing output inspired by” when really all it’s doing is performing billions of sums over the data you fed into it.
If it can be done through AI, it’s already been tested and put Out There as “commercial/artistic” attempts to “test the waters”.
There’s at least 12 Hopeful Nerds on TikReelsTube shorts who do nothing else but try to monetise the sheer glut of AI apps to Do Things. Doing shorts about them.
Including some pretty powerful filtering apps to create “clear” tracks of instruments from a studio mix, and ones that take such tracks and turn them into musical notation.
Another app to tie that all together, and a studio app to produce the whole thing.
All AI, all “good” ones very much Not Free for the scaling into “Pro” versions .
Those people have figured out selling shovels is what you do during a Gold Rush already….
And if you can easily “borrow” things …. Others can do the same to you…
Between the pittance streaming platforms pay, and the increasing attitude to remove AI generated junk from the major ones..
Not a decent gamble for stable extra income…
Mind… a properly produced/edited cassical piece set to Kazoo and Whoopee Cushion *would* be hilarious, and could well earn you those 15 minutes of Winning the Internet as people “borrow” it for their Toks and other shenanigans.
Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain already has the franchise.
Music AI is a lot simpler than anything else, as there’s a smaller “phase space” of possibilities. [url=”https://youtu.be/8kRCjG3Z0j8?si=wMvJZz_C688Vqudt&t=1410″]This[/url] is from about 1984 and is about 2K of BASIC on a Beeb which does almost random wandering about through a repeating melody.
Grrr. How do I get links to work in a post?
like this
Type alt-text first, select, click link icon in the minimenu, paste url there.
My Spectrum had something similar. It reproduced Mozart’s ‘randomised’ sonata where the next phrase was determined by the throw of dice.
I remember playing with that code. A long time ago, but I seem to think I typed it in from Your Computer translating from C64 Basic.
Can’t find the article or similar on-line though.
There were several versions, across several magazines…
And *by far* not all of them have been scanned and digitised.
The best ones taught you C64 machine code… and Hex ( Haxx) , and…
Skills that, for a while, until they organised Formal Education, earned me a decent buck.
My understanding is that the US patent office has held that AI cannot get copyrighted, because it is not the product of a person.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receive-copyrights-us-court-says-2023-08-21/
So you will make no money at all from this idea. The streamers would refuse to give you anything, and be completely legal doing so.
Which is why AI generated stuff is always claimed as “AI aided”…
On the grounds that the initial concept behind the art and editing steps are human (inter)action.
So you get the discussion about *how much* human interaction is needed to ….
(don’t forget that almost all of the greenscreen/CGI techniques used in feature films and animation are *heavily* “AI-aided”. The Big Studios have a Beef in this….)
Lawyers… got to love them… on a large bonfire….
Change one note of it, and it is now copyrighted. Like you can take Macbeth, change a word of it and it’s now Chester Draws Macbeth.
(Shakespeare’s works were mostly derived from other stories, although he sharpened them up).
Copyrighted in the US, if you file, pending further investigationa and Lawfare…
If it were *that* easy, Our Host’s idea would fly… And there would be no more “Plagiary” Lawsuits…. primarily in the US , of course. After something actually made money…
The tricky bit isn’t getting your copyright claim IN, it’s making sure other people’s claims are kept out.
With classic literature it’s easy because all copyright has lapsed, but if you were making a classical-music-playing model and expecting to commercially exploit it, you’d want to make sure your copyright trail was as squeaky-clean as the original IBM clone BIOS was.
Project Gutenberg scan early editions of books to avoid this.
You can’t derive from another copyrighted work. The problem with a lot of AI stuff is that it’s trained on copyrighted work. But Beethoven and Shakespeare are public domain.
It’s why Amadeus is the best music movie. No-one had to ask his permission. That Queen movie is so dire and boring because the band wanted to be portrayed a certain way, and the producers couldn’t get the music rights without doing that.
No shade on you for posting it, but goddamn that is a confused article. You can’t generalise between patent rulings and copyright rulings, and journalists shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near IP Law until they can show they know the difference between patents, trademarks and copyright, and they know a design patent is a type of trademark not a type of patent. I digress.
Now this article is talking about Stephen Thaler, who appears to be a loony who wants to get his computer named as an inventor, author, artist and so on because that would be cool or something. His main schtick seems to be that he shows up to patent/copyright offices and claims to have something he wants to file, but it has no author because it was authored by his computer.
Now courts can only try the case that’s in front of them, it’s not their job under a common-law system to go out and independently investigate the facts. The IP offices aren’t courts, but they also operate under this principle. So if I show up at the patent office and try to file something that I claim was invented by a dragon, then the patent office can just say “well only humans can invent things, not dragons” and tell me to be on my way, they don’t need to get involved in finding out if dragons are real or not.
So where this is going is that he has a lot of cases in a lot of countries that have gone something like:
— oh hi I would like a patent/copyright-registration on this thing that has no author
– well we believe you that it has no author and as it has no author you can’t have one
— oh wait I meant I was the author
– too bad no backsies
A UK court appears to have also told him to fuck off along much the same lines, their case being that the law should be taken seriously and not used as his personal marketing gimmick. https://www.jakemp.com/knowledge-hub/uk-high-court-reaffirms-ai-cannot-be-inventor/
There seems to be a good summary of the various DABUS cases here:
https://www.ipstars.com/NewsAndAnalysis/The-latest-news-on-the-DABUS-patent-case/Index/7366
Anyways, the tldr is that none of the DABUS rulings seem to be deciding anything about whether or not copyright/patent can subsist in an AI-generated work, they’re more “IF we accept your claim that the computer made this on its own and you didn’t make it by making the computer FOR SAKE OF ARGUMENT, then we rule that the computer can’t have a patent/copyright-registration because it’s a computer”.
It would be straightforward, I think, to distinguish these cases from any forthcoming “how far does copyright travel through the AI mincer” case on the basis that they don’t really address the issue but just accept it for sake of argument.
A copyright is an ownership right. At what point did a box of tin and plastic become an entity that can own things?
Well indeed.
There seems to be a lot of “not my problem, just doing my job” thinking throughout the whole process: there’s no way the lawyers representing him in his appeals didn’t know that, but they helped him take it through the courts anyway.
Possibly a contributing factor as to why the judgements have been so forthright and robust.
Actually, reading about the guy more he seems to be fully down the retired-engineer rabbithole, and probably needs some kind of psychiatric help.
https://blog.patentology.com.au/2023/08/profile-of-creator-of-ai-inventor-dabus.html
Didn’t Andrew Lloyd Webber already do that?
That was a bit of an enigma.
ALW, like Beethoven, used…. “Matrixes”.. and “Sequences”…
one of the reasons theirstuff all sounds more or less….. “consistent” and , like modern house/electronic, you can predict by ear what’s coming.
https://youtu.be/mkMJKqG_SDw?si=5bHNW0vo_qhBcDC3
Brilliant AI. The lyrics are well worth your attention.
Thankyou… saved for later use, and you just won *12* days of Winning the Internet.
Gods… this is Gold…. 😀
This one is absolute genius. It almost feels like it’s real, especially if you remember that the double meaning used to lean much more towards “cat” (e.g. Mrs Slocombe).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpFQoLIOP0k
Some inspiration from Stephen Lynch, methinks.
Damn Thats An Ugly Baby
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3zpT502CEs
Would only work until Spotify stops paying you – AI work can’t be copyrighted, there are no ‘ownership rights’ to it so Spotify can just play your uploads without paying you.